Re: [tlug] Re: LETTER FROM LINSPIRE FOUNDER (Godwin Stewart)

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Wed, 16 May 2007, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> The problem is the basic law (which is extremely broad and is strongly
> biased toward granting patents), compounded by the lack of improved
> laws from the Congress....

Well, in terms of intellectual property, overall, the Congress is moving
towards significantly worse laws, not better. ("Worse" in the sense
of upholding the original aims of IP laws, I mean.) Take the recent
copyright term extensions as an example. They've gone exactly backwards:
Disney wants to protect Mickey Mouse for yet longer so that they *don't*
have to innovate, not so that they do.

Anyway, even if we could manage to revert to the idea of using IP
protection to promote innovation, rather than established interests,
we still have some serious issues to deal with to which nobody yet
has any reasonable solution. A major issue is that the rate of change
and lifetime of ideas in some fields has increased/shrunk drastically
over the past fifty to one hundred years (computer algorithms are
a good example), making the idea of fourteen or twenty-eight year
protection for those ideas ridiculous, yet we still have other areas
(such as biomedical research) where things move much more slowly and
will probably never move faster (understanding the long-term effects of
drugs takes decades, and there appears to be no way to change that).

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974

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